OPINION
The National/Act/New Zealand First Government has been seriously impressive in its opening few months. I continue to be pleasantly surprised as the need to bring Winston Peters into the fold diminished my hopes that this Government could be as revolutionary as needed to reverse the explosion in the reach of the state under Labour. However, when governments embark on a program of rapid spending cuts and repeals, their hands need to be clean at all times.
Voters are quick to punish hypocrisy and the mere whiff of it can be enough to completely derail an otherwise good track record. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s decision to claim a $52,000 per year accommodation supplement for living in his own Wellington home, instead of Government House, may be within the rules but that is enough whiff to tarnish him permanently.
Former Act Party Leader Rodney Hide, who styled himself as Parliament’s perk-buster after first being elected in 1996, should give all politicians cause to stop and consider what allowances they claim; rules be damned. Hide’s decision to claim a 90% discount on his wife’s travel costs when she accompanied him on a trip to Europe in 2009 was within the rules but it also reeked of hypocrisy. Despite paying back the $12,000 to Parliamentary Services, Hide’s political star never recovered and he lost the leadership of the party to Don Brash in 2011.
Christopher Luxon is no perkbuster but he is very wealthy. Claiming a $52,000 allowance to live in his own Wellington house, on top of the $471,049 salary he earns as Prime Minister does not pass the ‘whiff test.’ Luxon is going to repay the $13,000 he has claimed thus far, but like the case of Bill ‘Dipton Dipper’ English who did the same thing, claiming this allowance at all will haunt Luxon for a long time.
While nobody has taken on the mantle of ‘perk-buster’ since the demise of Hide, the new coalition Government is the first since 1993 to embark on a program of seriously slimming down the public service, abolishing entire bureaucracies and cutting social spending. Those actions have more impact on individual New Zealanders than claiming a subsidy for your wife’s plane ride, so time will tell which form of hypocrisy is more damaging to a politician’s reputation with voters.
The most recent area highlighted for cuts by Associate Education Minister David Seymour is the $350 million Ke Ora, Ka Oka Health School Lunches Programme that feeds 235,000 students per day. The free lunch scheme for children is expensive for taxpayers. $25 million of the cost of the scheme covers the 10,000 lunches that are wasted daily. The scheme’s wishy washy six-level strategy is impossible to measure objectively, but claims that the school lunch scheme would improve attendance are demonstrably false. In 2011, 69% of students attended school at least 90% of the time. This had dropped to 58% in 2019 when the scheme was introduced. During the height of Covid-panic in 2020, 64% of students attended school at least 90% of the time but by term four of 2022 just 50.6% of students met attendance expectations. Would attendance have been worse without school lunches or is it simply a complete waste of money? Should David Seymour get his way and eliminate the entire scheme, Luxon’s pleading that claiming an accommodation allowance was in the rules will raise the ire of hundreds of thousands of voting families required to feed their own children from existing household budgets. Yes, the scheme should be scrapped but Luxon’s claiming of an accommodation allowance makes for terrible optics.
Monday’s announcement of a draft $20 billion transport policy, which includes a 23% increase in vehicle registration fees next year, followed by a 19% increase in 2026, will also stretch household budgets. It could be argued that this is user pays, though I don’t think it accurately links road use to payments as well as replacing all fuel excise taxes with congestion charges would. In any case, whatever the merits of a mechanism for increasing funding for New Zealand’s horrific roading network, multi-millionaire Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s decision to claim an accommodation supplement for living in his own home is a politically toxic background distraction that won’t go away just because he repaid it.
Following her comments regarding the impending demise of Newhub, at the loss of three hundred jobs, Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee’s sensible initial comments led to her going into hiding for a few days. She said there was nothing the Government could have done (TVNZ and the $55 million public-interest journalism fund paid during the Covid epidemic proves otherwise but the Government still shouldn’t get involved). She also correctly stated that the media market is changing with more news available online, newspapers including video on their websites and many more internet-based media outlets becoming available. She is absolutely right and I’m disappointed at the way she has backpedalled and spent the following days refusing interviews. However, letting Newshub succumb to healthy market forces as TV viewership declines will be noticed by the several hundred thousand New Zealanders who watch the news on TV3 every night. Many elderly and those on low incomes can’t expand their entertainment budgets beyond watching free-to-air TV. They will also remember that Christopher Luxon claimed an accommodation allowance for living in a house he owned in Wellington.
All three parties in the coalition Government need to review what allowances their MPs are claiming, whether it passes the ‘whiff-test’ and ensure their personal balance sheets remain clean because their program of spending cuts loses some of its sheen if they are found to be increasing their incomes through hypocritical, though legal, means. A review of the existing rules to stop politicians from taking the mickey, following internal party checks, is probably the only thing that can restore this smudge on the reputation of Luxon’s Government.